Not to be a Grinch, but is it really necessary to decorate for Christmas? This question has been gaining strength in my head these past few holiday seasons. I blame the nativities.
My grandmother, who lives with us, is a collector. She has collected spoons and outhouses, cats and carpets and cookbooks. But her greatest collection of all is the nativities. I do enjoy telling people that my grandma owns over 2,000 nativities. (No, I did not add an extra zero. That was not a typo.) She doesn't put all of them up every year, thankfully. Only about 700 make it to the shelves on any given year. But. Have you ever shuttled the boxes for 700 nativities up and down stairs over a weeklong period? It's not fun. She usually gets some friends from her church to help out, but we do end up schlepping a lot of boxes.
On second thought, I don't think the nativities are what is making me question the whole concept of decorating for Christmas. Decorating has always made me grumpy. First of all, when my sisters and I were younger it used to be an all-day affair, and that was just tedious. But even now that we're grown up and decorating time has shrunk to a couple hours at most, I still find Christmas decorating irksome. I enjoy having the decorations up, but
putting them up and taking them down again are Not My Favorite. Fluffing the branches of our fake tree, getting scratches on our hands and dust up our noses; edging around the living room, which is crowded with boxes and people, and inevitably getting in each other's way; attic funk; again, hauling heavy boxes up and down the stairs. With all of us working together (there are five of us) it's really not that bad, especially with our traditional Christmas CD playlist singing in the background. I'm not planning to rebel against our annual day-after-Thanksgiving decorating spree, but when I move out and get my own apartment ... maybe I won't decorate it. Or maybe, and this is more likely because I really do like the ambience of Christmas, I will get a very tiny potted tree and not bother putting ornaments on it, because ornaments take up storage space. And maybe I'll make a pinecone garland, and you can bet I'll have at least one strand of fairy lights, because fairy lights are the best.
My ambivalence about decorating doesn't really touch on the zero waste aspect of it. My family has used the same artificial Christmas tree ever since I can remember; it was only this year that we upgraded: my aunt gave us her old artificial Christmas tree (which is newer than our old one, and much easier to set up). As long as you use the same artificial tree every year until it falls over, I don't have a problem with artificial trees.
But those are topics for another time. Next year, maybe! When we're not dealing with, you know, 2020.
Comments
Post a Comment